He was talking about upgrading to 8.1. Not about upgrading hardware. Although some features are only available on newer hardware.

Everyone who has Win 8 will get WDDM 1.3 and DX11.2 though as its a free upgrade from 8 > 8.1. Win 8 already has 13% of Steam users and is already the second most used OS on Steam so gamers are taking to it.Reply

Love my job, since I've been bringing in $82h… I sit at home, music playing while I work in front of my new iMac that I got now that I'm making it online. (Home more information)http://goo.gl/xp09cReply

Would you, as a company that intends to make a profit and so needs to manage its development resources with care, develop for a program you are phasing out? I wouldn't likely do that myself.

I'm not saying you are entirely wrong here, I'm just saying there is likely more to the picture than just selling a newer product.

Don't cut your nose off to spite your face here. :) It's a great benefit, and not just for SoC type uses either, it makes the job of managing graphics engineering better for everyone, and so better for any end-user in terms of getting more from their budget spent on anything involved with making what appears on your screen look its best.

The improvements in efficiency that came from DX11 itself is one of the things that allowed Blizzard to upgrade World of Warcraft's engine and still let lower-end computers handle the game decently. WoW is still mostly a DX9 game, as are most of the games that have some DX11 functionality (it might help to understand that DirectX, and OpenGL, are collections of APIs that a developer can pretty much pick and choose from, they don't have to use all of it to benefit). This change will allow for more of the same kind of thing.Reply

I've never really thought about how a APU might fare in a GPU computing environment, I sort of ignored it thinking 'integrated graphics == rubbish' But that isn't really true anymore. With the reduced memory overhead I think this could actually be quite useful;

In my experience GPU computing is often not applicable unless you are using very big data sets (literally millions of elements) between the transfer overhead and slower clock speed, a GPU only wins out when all of it's processing cores are in use for an extended period. With memory overhead reduced I can see the threshold for porting computation to the GPU lowering quite a bit on some systems.Reply

Ummm. A 1080p screen is millions of elements. Any sort of video editing benefits, even without the MDB.Likewise for editing those high res pics from just about any camera, converting to and from JPEG, etc.. Data sets with millions of elements are really quite common.Reply

Maybe ANGLE is the solution to WebGL's inherent security problem, potentially allowing kernel access. If such is the case, why not ? Do we know that they are using ANGLE or ANGLE-like translation for WebGL in IE11 ?Reply

Is it just me or is anyone else upset that that VISUALS on Win8 look like crayon drawings compared to Win7 AERO...?

We actually went backwards... Even with multi-mon... And they STILL HAVE CRAP for tablet share..

Ballmer's going to destroy MS... They broke HyperV with USB3 controllers, Modern apps have no entry in the volume mixer AND they jump around between monitors... Flash in IE is a NIGHTMARE... I had to search for an hour to find the right Flash package...

I had more blue screens in one month than when I worked at MS testing Windows XP...

I'M TOTALLY PISSED. I want my "Modern" VISUALS... But as I said, they did it because Intel IGPs at 100W can barely do AERO, so of course ATOM withotu PowerVR will get them sued AGAIN...